The powerful front pushed a large wall of seawater, called a storm surge, estimated at 7.5 meters high, into coastal cities equivalent to Tacloban, a city of 240,000 people.
Overall, Haiyan made its way through a gaggle of islands with a complete area the dimensions of Portugal.
LOW-LYING ISLANDS
The Philippines is the primary major landmass within the typhoon belt within the Pacific Ocean. The wall of mountains on the coast of the principal island of Luzon dampens a few of the impact, but smaller, flatter islands – equivalent to those along the Haiyana Road – are more exposed.
Much of Tacloban is lower than five meters above sea level. The city and other nearby towns were defenseless against the storm surge that surged through a shallow bay wedged between the islands of Leyte and Samar.
The five biggest typhoons that hit Asia
The five biggest typhoons that hit Asia
IMPROPER WARNINGS
Although the hardest-hit areas received early warnings, the weather service and other officials later admitted that victims were unaware of the term “storm surge.”
The last deadly storm surge in Tacloban occurred in 1887, greater than a century before Haiyan. In a rustic with many regional languages, the federal government also didn’t have local terms to speak this phenomenon to everyone.
After the disaster, the federal government agency worked with linguists to develop simpler meteorological terms to make sure everyone fully understood the danger posed by typhoons, floods, landslides and other antagonistic events.
Extreme poverty
In a rustic where one in five people earns lower than $2 a day, the individuals who crossed Haiyan’s path stood out for his or her profound poverty. Many of the victims built their homes on the narrow coastal plains of the islands and made a living from fishing and farming.
Haiyan destroyed or damaged 1.14 million homes, a lot of them made from low-cost, flimsy materials that stood no likelihood against nature’s wrath.
NO EVACUATION
Under the geographic hazard mapping program launched in 2006, the national government marked many of the disaster-prone areas.
However, local authorities didn’t evacuate many vulnerable population groups from the danger zones, partly because they didn’t fully appreciate the threat and partly because they didn’t construct enough shelters.
In the town of Hernani on the island of Samar, where Haiyan was the primary of many to make landfall, several families were devastated by the storm surge as they left their flimsy huts to weather the storm at a low-lying school built along the coast, neighbors said.
